Friday, September 16, 2011

A Hidden Past

I found it interesting after watching the video about the Black Newspapers was interesting. However, it is of no surprise that it is often left out of history classes. Maybe it is deemed "not important enough". This is not just a problem with Texas, but I think throughout the nation in history education.

For instance, people might not be aware that Texas, and Dallas specifically, used to be where the Ku Klux Klan based their operations out of.  Or that during the Texas Revolution, the Tejanos, Texas natives of Mexican descent, supported the Texas Revolution just as much as the white Americans that were moving into Texas. Or that the Mexican-American War was one of the most unjustified wars in American history and that it was completely racial.

Why is it this way? We often deem white history as the more important part of history while minorities often take a back seat. However, a more complete picture of history can be captured through studying accounts of minorities like the Tejanos. For example, the lynching of Jesse Washington in Waco in 1916 was one of the most gruesome lynchings of its time. Yet I never learned about it until taking a class about Texas history in college. It was these events that made NAACP choose Texas as the state to begin systematically attacking racial injustices.

We, in order to understand society as a whole, need to know these stories and events in history. And it is not only Texas that these stories remain hidden. The North was fighting for extinction of slavery in the Civil War but not because the cared about the welfare of blacks. They were concerned that if slavery were to extend North, that factory workers would be out of the job with an influx of unpaid labor.

It's also facts like this that need to be looked at to emphasize a point that the North was not this redeeming savior of blacks, like it is often portrayed. From Boston, Massachusetts to Dallas, Texas, blacks faced, and do currently face, prejudice and while Southern cities exhibited more physical acts of violence,  it should not go without notice that many Northern cities were just as prejudiced. Many Northern cities deal with racial tension, Cincinnati being a prime example.

All this evidence goes to show that both sides need to be looked at and ignoring facts just equates to ignorance.  

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